The Full Blog

Entries categorized as ‘strategy’

Why the recession could be good for business

Monday 13 October 2008 · No Comments

Today the UK government has called time on the excesses, self interest and downright bad management of the financial services sector, by taking control of British banks.  Whether it will have the desired effect remains to be seen, but frankly, its about time.  I lost patience with the sector a while back, when a leading FS manager told me that it wasn’t in his interest to “put customers first” and now we are witnessing the product of this mind-set.

I’m not a fan of this government, but it does seem that they’ve got this right and for once I feel the Britain is looking bold and decisive.  UK Gov’s move may not produce a level playing field, but hopefully it will create a more sensible game, however the fall-out is sure to continue with customers far from relaxed about choosing financial patners. And that’s where the potential is.  Ultimately, the banks and financial institutions that are first to persuade consumers and businesses that they can be trusted will triumph.

Trust, is the very basis of any Brandship - the relationships between brands and their stakeholders - so its easy to see that, given the revelations of the last few weeks, the brand equity of banks is as low as a limbo-dancing gnome.  For now they are all tarred with the same brush.  We all know now that for years banks have been tricking us into believing that they were on our side while craftily lining their own pockets with our cash, so for any financial services business to dig themselves out of this one is a big ask.  However, that’s the challenge they all face and its clear that the same old, same old just isn’t going to cut it.  This time they have to be transparent and build brands with real integrity.  Attempting this feat with their existing management in place would be like a paedophile applying for a job as a kids’ swimming instructor, and that’s why the government stepping into the management shoes will, at least, give a few of them a chance.  Now its a case of a massive change management process and that can only be good for business.  Who’ll be first to the tape.

While the banks are working on this one, the rest of the commercial world are considering how they can survive the after shock.  There’s no doubt about it, a lot of businesses are going to tumble in the next few months, but amid the rubble there’s a real opportunity for the bold.

As we’ve seen with banks in the US and UK, there are always bigger vultures to pick over the bones of the those that fail and in this vein a good many short-term wins will be had by organisations with strong and inviting brand communities that can offer shelter to the customers of their deceased competitors.  This will come about in two ways - pro-active, acquisition by competitors and investors of organisations and brands on the verge of a crash and reactive, mopping up by strong brands of the displaced customers of their weaker competitors.

But moreso than in the normal process of acquisition the challenge doesn’t end acquisition.  Its one thing to provide a consumer with temporary shelter, but although the cost of acquisition could be modest compared to the recent past, the real test will be whether these brands can persuade their new customers to make a home with them.  This is where I see the real potential.  I foresee a period of floating customers, like deserted wives, reluctant to commit to long-term relationships and suitor brands falling over themselves to reel them in and turn them into life-partners.  And I predict, honesty will prevail.  If nothing else worthwhile comes of this situation I be live it will convince a few more brands to stop making empty-promises and a shift to genuineness, transparency and a genuine commitment to customer satisfaction.  Another reason why the recession will be good for business.

Because brand communities are a product of their members - significantly their customers - any acquisitive organisations will also have to be wary of the risk of alienating their existing customers as the dynamic of their brand is changed by a large influx of new members, but, if they are sufficiently sorted to have created a strong enough brand community to pull off the acquisition trick in the first place the chances are they’ll have this under control too.

Its common practice in recessionary times for organisations to tighten their belts and sit it out, but the record clearly shows that this is not the path to success and it definitely isn’t the way to go now.  If you want to to make the most of the opportunities that the recession is providing you need to be pro-active, take a close look at your brand and your organisation.  Are you in shape to meet the challenge?  If not get to work.  At the end of this recession the organisations that deserve success will have it and there’ll be some gaps in the line up too.  But then again, I’ve always felt that Darwin nailed it with the process of natural selection.   I think we’ll all be better off for the clear out.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · CRM · Competitors · Darwin · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · bankers · banks · brand · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · business development · business strategy · change management · community · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · management · marketing · natural selection · opportunity · phil darby · promise · recession · strategy · transparency

Where the growth is.

Thursday 2 October 2008 · 2 Comments

Listen! Hear that? Its the sound of the penny dropping in thousands of boardrooms around the globe. Actually, I didn’t hear it either, but its like a black hole, you might not see it, but there’s increasing evidence of it having happened. 

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have had a few interesting discussions lately with organisations that were looking to leverage their brand community and all of a sudden it seems I am falling over organisations that are doing the same. I was in  Stavanger early this week, talking to investors, business managers and marketing services businesses and the theme emerged there and yesterday in Prague I met a marketer from a leading mobile operator who had this issue clearly in view too.  

At last businesses are realising that its not viable to rely on acquisition to generate your growth - its far too expensive and the return is modest, mainly because most markets are fully subscribed and everyone is buttoning down and tying-in their customers.  The only untethered targets are in emerging economies where you’ll be climbing over your competitors to reach the same customers.  You have to do this of course for the sake of your long-term health, but its more important than ever to do it efficiently and if you visit this post frequently you’ll know that I think we still have some way to go in developing efficient marketing.  However, that’s another subject.

There aren’t a lot of folks around right now who are looking for stuff to spend their cash on, most are struggling with the commitments they already have and those that aren’t are quickly becoming as rare as hen’s teeth.  Other than the poor inundated souls in these new territories there just aren’t going to be any new customers to chase so your growth has to come from your existing customers.  This is nothing new.  Way back in 2005 the State of Marketing Survey that was conducted by IDG for Prophet revealed that 62% of business growth was already comming from existing customers and that organisations were looking to the same segment for 72% of their growth in 2006 (it doesn’t seem that Prophet have followed up on that report so I can’t say that they were right although its a believable figure).

So, there’s still no doubt that the emphasis has to be on growth from existing customers (in fact it might be moreso) but factors like the arrival of recession mean that even this cash cow is about to become tougher to milk.  So where is the easy growth going to come from?  The answer to that question takes us straight back to The Brand As A Medium, one of my long time causes, but, of course, to to be in this game you first have to have a strong brand community. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, I’ve been promoting the need for brand development for years.  If you weren’t listening and didn’t get your brand in shape you are in trouble because you don’t build the kind of brand strength you will need to make this work, overnight.  In the past I’ve managed to deliver measurable results from brand-building programmes over a twelve month time-span, but, everything is tougher now and if your brand isn’t sorted already, you need to be thinking in terms of a three-year development phase before your community offers third parties any real value.  Sorry, but these are the facts!

Before you jump from your executive balcony though …  If you start now, and I mean this minute, today, and run a brand development programme in parrallel with an operational efficiency drive you might just emerge from the recession fit for battle.  Note please, I’m not saying you’ll achieve growth to match that of the businesses that did their prep.  You might get something short term, but for you payback will come when trading conditions improve.  Never before has Full Effect Marketing and programmes like Brand Discovery been more relevant.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · advertising · brand · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · business development · business strategy · community · efficiency · integrated marketing · internal marketing · management · marketing · media · phil darby · strategy · third-party advertisers

Creating an Ideas Organisation

Thursday 18 September 2008 · No Comments

I have an absolutely unshakable belief in the “ideas organisation”, which is why I get so pissed off by organisations that only want to perpetuate a winning formula.  They just don’t get it, do they?  The facts are indesputable, a winning formula is only winning when its new and original, once its old-hat or plagarised the value dissappears FAST and that’s getting to mean a realy short shelf life for most businesses.  As I have said many times before - “Your organisation is only as good as your NEXT big idea”.  Move on!

Of course, when your organisation is structured and geared to perpetuating the routine, its not easy to climb out of the rut.  This is noticeable at every level of an offending organisation.  In my Brand Discovery workshops I always start with an exercise designed to help delegates break the mold.  A quick and simple demonstration of how it feels to think normally.  Yes, normally, because normal thinking is what drives creativity.  The problem that we have is that we mistakenly belive that the way we think every day is normal.  Well, wake up and smell the coffee, you aren’t normal, you are conditioned!

Jennifer Goddard reports on BNET this week on Mr Mindmapping, Tony Buzan’s conference that she attended in Singapore, where he spoke of an experiment in Utah that pitted under-fives against graduates in a creativity test.  I think it is a rather old and well-known piece of research that he refers to, where the under-fives won 95% to 10%, thus proving, or so it would seem, that we start creative and have it beaten (read educated) out of us.  In one of my favourite presentations on TED, Ken Robinson promotes just this thought.

So with all this stuff working against you, how are you going to create your ideas organisation?  The way I see it, its not about workshops and brainstorming, useful though they may be once you are an ideas organisation.  Sadly, I usually find these things are more “last chance saloon” than “brave new world” and tend to find their way onto the agenda about the time an organisation realises it doesn’t have a hope. 

Great buinesses have idea generation in their DNA, or rather “idea liberation”, because the ideas are always there, hiding away in the corners of the minds of your employees, the task is to set them free.  How do you do this?  Well firstly you have to give them, value.  

We all have ideas, all the time.  Small ones, big ones, funny ones, evil ones, even profitable ones.  The reason that they don’t ever see the light of day is because we are embarassed to express them!  Why embarrassed?  Well, I guess that’s one of the mysteries of social conditioning, but basically most ideas are pants and we just can’t live with that.  We’re so insecure that we can’t bear the thought of people knowing that we had a stupid idea.  How how stupid an idea is that?

We have to learn the value of mistakes.  I’m sure Michaeangelo didn’t just turn up and knock off the Sistine chapel first attempt.  He must have had a warm up, a trial run, scrapped a few attempts even,  Shit, nobody’s that good!  So get real.  And the reality is that there are loads of crap ideas, but every now and then there is a really great one and it isn’t always obvious at first encounter which is which, so you have to give them all an airing.

So, if you want to be an Ideas Organisation, and, frankly, these days no organisation can afford not to be, the first step is to value ideas,  Sounds obvious, but take a look around you, it doesn’t happen.  We still value only the good ones and snigger at the people who come up with the runts.   We forget that, good or bad, all ideas are worth something because without the hopeless ones you won’t ever discover the great ones.  How do you gt to this, well, hey, I get paid for this, so If you want the “how”, hire me!

Once you have achived this though, step two involves creating the conduit through which the ideas are funnelled into the system.  What system?  The one you create in step three that’s what system.  Too fast for you?  OK, here’s it is again,

  • Step one - value ideas.  Convince yourself that ideas are always good and some are great.
  • Step two - build a communications conduit.  Two-way so that you can persuade your stakeholders that you value ideas, then they will too and as a result they’ll bring them to you.
  • Step three - develop a way of presenting the ideas.  Its important to help people express their ideas in the nearest to business terms they can get, and anyway, its a good business discipline training exercise for them.
  • Step four - Create a test process.  All you need do here is decide how these ideas are going to be explored, the stages that you will go though to minimise risk (Yes, of course there’s risk, the smart guys minimise it though)
  • Step five - establish criteria for judgement. You need to be able to tell as early as possible in your exploration whether an idea will fly, so you need a set of criteria.  You might choose generic ones that support only your Brand Model, or you might design a different set for each idea or every stage in theexploration process.  
  • Step six - Implement.  Its amazing how many great ideas get put on hold, until the time is right.  The time is NOW!  And, if you are facing difficult times such as we all are now, the time was yesterday, so you’ll have to move fast to catch up!  Every time there is recession in any part of the world the guys who push ahead with idea development end up being the winners.  Check the facts.

Now you’re “cooking on gas”.  You are an ideas organisation!  You’re not?  Didn’t like it then eh?  Oh well, it was just an idea!

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · Training · ideas · innovation · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · strategy · the big idea · workshops

Guerrilla or Gorilla?

Tuesday 2 September 2008 · No Comments

Guerrilla or Gorilla? is the title of one of the sections in my Full Effect Marketing seminars.  I have had a great deal of success with Guerrilla marketing, from dressing up actors like pantomime characters and placing them on public transport where they proclaimed the benefits of a product loudly and at length to packed carriages of travellers to scattering red shoes around a city and creating a treasure hunt, but I always love to see other people’s ideas.

This is the folk art of marketing communications and massively undervalued by most organisations.  I never get tired of the ideas that other folks come up with and found this on Speak Marketing and Sales I coudn’t resist sharing it with you.

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Guerrilla · Guerrilla marketing · Roaching · The Full Effect Company · below-the-line · integrated marketing · marketing · phil darby · strategy · the big idea · you tube

The Brand as a Medium

Tuesday 15 July 2008 · 1 Comment

Full Effect Marketing is all about efficiency, getting extra bang for your buck, stretching budgets, better ROI and for years I have been introducing my clients to the power of a well developed brand in the shape of revenue-generating partnerships. It’s not always going to finance a space shot, but as one of my favourite brands would say “every little helps”.

This is nothing new, of course “The Brand as a Medium” has been around for years. The stuff of loyalty scheme operators, supermarket retailers (where there’s far more appreciation of the concept of brand community anyway) web marketers and a few clued-in consumer brands, but it strikes me that it’s a concept that’s finally coming of age.

I have had conversations recently with a clutch of media owners about the potential of their brand communities. It seems they are all beginning to view themselves as integrated communications consultancies - a no-brainer in my book, but an opportunity that is really nowhere near harnessed by the owners of these brands - and mobile operators - folks with the same kind of opportunity, but far greater entrepreneurship, who are my tip for the next owners of this “space”, a space that, unlike the modest returns that some brand owners might settle for, knows no limit.

Talking of space, its all there in Jim Taylor’s “Space Race” and you don’t even need to read between the lines. Jim was quite clear that media owners would come to represent a real challenge to advertising agencies (remember them?) in the race to establish an integrated marketing model with a consulting approach, which you’ll not be surprised to hear is just how I feel it should be. Its not that traditional media are redundant, its just that with an ever-widening range of communications options and a growing understanding of what marketing is really all about, they take on a different relevance and we are using them in different ways.

I guess The Brand as a Medium was seeded in retail marketing where the brand over the door provided a showcase for the brands on the shelves and the key lesson, which remains the key to new players, was quickly learned - The company you keep will reflect on perceptions people have of you (your brand image). We’ve all received a warning at some time that someone might be “a decent sort of chap, but he mixes with some weird people”. A prestige retail brand stocking inferior product brands will quickly be relegated to the same league as its suppliers. The converse is also true of course - a social-climbing brand can gain a little lift by being seen in the right places. Again this is nothing new to fmcg manufactureres, but it applies equally in any sector. When I was at Saatchi & Satchi (the original and best) we often had organisations in crisis offer to give us their business because they knew that the announcement of the partnership would tend to buy them a little time from their creditors or even give their share-price a filip - hey, the good old days!

Supermarket retailers have in the past been the closest thing their suppliers could find to an integrated marketing communications solution. An fmcg brand could appear in the retailer’s advertising, door drops, DM pieces and TV spots, be a feature of in-store demos, in-store radio and TV, appear on floors, check-out conveyors, staff T-shirts, till receipts and more, all before the customer even arrived at the point-of-sale (Unilever call it “The path to purchase”). A communications solution like this is high value because the target is narrowly defined but people like Tesco took the definition even further with their data-rich Clubcard scheme. Integrated marketing like this builds relationships between all stakeholders, provides incremental sales for suppliers and additional revenue for the retailer. The good news is that any organisation can play in this space.

If your brand community is tight and loyal other brands will pay to mix it with you and yours. They know that the invitation alone is worth a premium because community members will at least give them a hearing, but be picky about who you invite - you can’t issue ASBOs to unruly guests and their behaviour will always impact on your credibility for better or worse.

Its an area that fascinates me (My retail heritage I guess) so for those of you who are suddenly intent on fully leveraging your brand I’m always up for a discussion on the subject. Meanwhile here are my top five pointers to success.

  1. Understand what “community” means
  2. Know your community members (customers, distributors, employees, advertisers etc.)
  3. Beware who you invite over (esp. partners, advertisers, contributors)
  4. Be sure to give value to everyone
  5. keep a grip on what you stand for (but understand that your community will continually evolve).

Welcome to the world of integrated media solution ownership!

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Retail · advertising · below-the-line · brand development · brands · business development · business strategy · communications · data · management · marketing · optimisation · optimization · phil darby · retailer · social groups · strategy

Jerry Springer nails National Branding

Sunday 22 June 2008 · 1 Comment

I was watching Question Time on the BBC in the UK yesterday evening and one of the topics of conversation was the recent Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. I don’t want to get into the details of the treaty here, but basically it opens the door to the expansion of the EU.

The debate last night turned to the different attitudes of people in different countries to the EU or more specifically a central government. One of the points made was that while some people at least were happy with the idea of a central management system of some kind they maintained that the right of government as such and in particular law making should remain with the individual member states. The main reason seemed to be the belief that laws define a community and in particular nations, and I tend to agree.

Jerry Springer (I can’t imagine how he got there, but he did) who I’m being uncharacteristically generous when I say, was just about holding his own among far more eloquent and knowledgable speakers said that the individual states in the US had from many perspectives lost their identity and that the general move there and elsewhere around the world is toward a far less state-aware attitude, a point that other delegates were quick to point out to him did not apply to countries/states outside of the US. However, he was shrewd enough to identify that the real subject here is not so much national pride, but pride in community (my word not his) and “community” is equally likely to apply to any belief system, set of values or brand (again his viewpoint, my word).

Jerry was somewhat hampered by his limited vocabulary, but those who took the time, as I did, to try to work out what he was trying to say would have realised that he actually hit the nail on the head. Sadly it seemed that the rest of the forum didn’t take the time and the point was missed in one of those short embarrassed pauses that could be replaced by the phrase “what the **** is he whittering on about?”.

Jerry’s point was that though there are people who still retain pride in their nationality, this is but one of an infinite array of communities to which we as individuals may choose to belong. Communities are encapsulations of a common interest, values or opinions. Most traverse national boundaries. We can be British by birth but European, a treckie or anything else for that matter, by adoption. Lord knows, if our identities were compulsorily identified by nationality, nominated or natural, I’d be hard pushed to elect a country, I’ve lived in so many. I only remember that I started out in the UK because that’s where my mother hangs out and she’s not moved in all this time!

Happily, we don’t have to define ourselves by nationality, which defines the challenge that I frequently refer to in my on-going debate about “National Branding” and one to which the UK is sadly failing to rise. Its OK for some, but others prefer to hang their hat on a sport, or other special interest. There are communities like FaceBook or World of Warcraft, the mythical world that keeps millions of sad bastards worldwide glued to their computers for days and nights on end. For these people this is their world and how they want to be identified. This perspective is the playing field where brand communities compete for members with nations, interests, movies, music and many more delineators. You don’t even have to be an exclusive member of any one community, you might feel it takes a few communities to accurately represent your personality, interests or values and while one of these that you choose might be a country, your national brand doesn’t have to be your primary definition. We also migrate between communities as we age, as we fall victim to outside influences, as fashions change or brand change or disappoint us.

An example of this in action is the current European football championships (no its not “soccer” its European so its definitely “football) from which we Brits, because we are pants at the game, are excluded. Having paid up-front for the rights to televise the event well before England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were sent back to their changing room, the networks had to set about garnering some interest from us. It seems it wasn’t much of a challenge. Brits have adopted competing nations and supported them through the campaign because they represent something that we can relate to - Croatia because we admire their grit in rebuilding their nation after their war, Turkey because some guy offered you fifty camels for your girlfriend last time you were on holiday there, Portugal because its where Manchester United’s Ronaldo comes from, or the Netherlands … well … because you like orange!

Once again its all about brands. Brands are present in every aspect of our lives and smart marketers (and Jerry Springer) understand that and use it to their advantage. Its called brand-building.

Categories: BBC · Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Government · Jerry Springer · National Branding · Question Time · The Full Effect Company · brand · brand development · brands · community · marketing · phil darby · social groups · strategy

Business body-building

Friday 30 May 2008 · No Comments

Anybody involved in sports training knows that if you want to develop muscles you do so by constantly pushing them beyond their limits. You push weights that are heavier than you have pushed before, the fibres in your muscles break and bleed and you feed them protein to fix them and they become bigger and better than before.  So, nothing is easy, right?

The great squash player and recently retired World Champion and World Number one Peter Nicol was training at his peak by pushing his boundaries too. Like other elite sportsmen and women he followed the theory that your brain has a built-in fail-safe that protects you from over-doing it, that this margin is rather larger than it needs to be.  By ignoring the messages you get from your brain during exercise that tell us mere mortals to ease-off you demonstrate to your brain that you can do more without actually dying. Next time your brain lets you go further before telling you to stop. Well, it worked for Peter!

The business world isn’t much different, Last evening I went out to eat with my son. We found our way to one of those up-scale food courts with a host of trendy restaurants (and inevitably a few less trendy or up-scale ones) and set about making our choice. As it was we ended up at the hand-made burger restaurant and it was great, but during our deliberations we considered (for a nanosecond at least) TGI Friday’s.

I remember Friday’s from when my son was a child (that’s twenty years ago) and we used to go to our local TGI occasionally for a treat. It was always a kid’s place to me, but apart from being about as far away from grown up dining as you could get, then it was new, and funky and they tried. I mention this because yesterday we concluded that TGI Friday’s have committed that unforgivable sin - they are still doing the same old thing!

This is an old chestnut of mine - business success being more about the fact that you are new and different than what that difference is and that once you have established your place on the map with a new formula, you are duty-bound to start looking at improvement or re-invention. However, that’s not quite my main point here.

Last week one of the guys I mountain bike with accused me of being too competitive. I say accused because that’s how he meant his comment to be interpreted, but frankly I was flattered. Personally, I would rarely use the words “too” and “competitive” in the same sentence. His point was that I tend to streak off up hills leaving everyone else behind and disillusioned. Now, I have to say that this isn’t strictly true. In fact there are many of my riding chums that leave me behind in the same way in such circumstances, but as far as the group in question were concerned, I guess my critic was correct - Its all a matter of context and the relative fitness or skills of those who you are riding with at the time. The point I made in reply was that while I’ll buy the “competitive” label its not that I am competing with the guys who are riding with me particularly (although that has been known) I compete with myself, trying to push my limits because, although the view from the top of a climb is always a reward for the effort involved the real point is the challenge of getting there as quickly as I can and quicker than the last time. The fact that I am quicker than you isn’t really a concern to me, but, inevitably if I always approach my rides in this way I’ll improve to the point where I will beat you and ultimately any other challengers every time.

I approach my work in the same way. I start every project with the objective of doing it better than I did last time. Sure I have the competition in my peripheral vision, but I’m focussed on my own Personal Best. As long as I always work that way my performance will improve by increments and when I have been doing it for long enough (and I’ve been at this for a while now) I guess I’ll beat anybody.

Because I work this way I am more than usually irritated by businesses and people who don’t rise to the challenge in the same way. Its perfectly clear to me that once you have a Brand Model to represent your objectives (because a Brand Model will always be the starting point of any business development strategy), if everyone in an organisation approached their work like a body-builder or sports-person their organisation would pretty soon be unbeatable.

This thinking is similar to the 110% philosophy. I heard an American business guru explain this by asking a room full of people what percentage of their objective they thought it was reasonable to achieve. The suggestions were something like 85% or 90%. He then equated this to an airline’s success in delivering passengers to their destination and drove the point home by suggesting that it represented a plane crash every so-many minutes. “So you think that’s acceptable?” he asked. It was a simple next step for delegates to nominate 110% success their objective with the expectation being 100% achievement.

Whichever way you look at it its clear that if you want to succeed you are going to have to put yourself out a bit, aim high, compete with yourself. This is reasonably easy for most senior managers because they have a better perspective of the business. Further down the chain of command though its harder to relate to. That’s where internal marketing, that other message that I keep repeating, comes in. Its the internal marketing that gets your workforce thinking like a body-builder and which provides the incentive. I also feel that a lot of business attach too much importance to what their competitors are doing. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t be interested in the guy down the street, but all too often the performance that competitors achieve becomes your objective and that’s bad for a lot of reasons.

So, if you want your business to succeed you too must remember the lessons of our great sports-people and think like a body-builder focus on your own performance, aim to be better every time and don’t stop when you win - keep at it and make your competitors eat your dust!

Categories: Brand Model · Competitors · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · business development · business strategy · communications · internal marketing · management · marketing · strategy

Since when was marketing the same as communications or sales?

Monday 19 May 2008 · No Comments

I’ve been having one of those weeks when the same question repeatedly turns up and this week it has been an old one that never ceases to surprise me. Early in the process of my Brand Discovery programme workshops we get around to defining marketing. Simple you might think, but you’d be surprised. There’s no lack of confidence behind the answers I get, but there are some very weird ideas!

The most common problem is that people - and remember the people I am talking to are supposed to be marketers so they should have this well and truly sorted - confuse marketing and marketing communication. Of course communication is a critical component of marketing, but it’s by no means the whole deal and if that’s your universe then not only is life going to be difficult and boring you won’t actually achieve much.

The other popular misconception is that marketing and sales are the same thing. We see the mistake made every day in recruitment ads. but just because some half-wit, or even a few of them don’t know their arses from their elbows doesn’t make it any less of a crime to agree with them. A crime, by the way, for which I believe perpetrators should be strung up by their delicate body parts and flogged with a copy of one of those marketing tombs that these people have on their bookshelf, but none of them (apparently) read!

You know what I mean. Read beyond the headline of an ad. for a marketing manager and the text describes a sales job. Yes, sales are a component of marketing, but they are just another bus-stop on the scenic route to profit. Marketing is far broader and more complex than sales.

If you Google definitions of “marketing” you’ll see the same mistakes time and again, but the dictionary definition and the one that thankfully you’ll come up with most frequently goes something like this:

“Marketing is the process of generating profit by identifying and leveraging an organisation’s resources to satisfy consumer needs.

Simple isn’t it? Well, yes and no. Its succinct for sure, but the implications are complex. Looking at it like this (which I absolutely believe is the correct definition - that’s why I wrote it!) it’s instantly obvious that marketing plays a part in every function within any organisation. Its about designing products and service offers that you can deliver using the resources at your disposal and which satisfy consumer needs, making sure that they are available and at the right price and telling potential customers about it and more.

While you are doing this you get to understand more about customers, competitors and market trends, which helps you identify your weaknesses (wrong manufacturing equipment, poor distribution and my favourite, people and recruitment etc.) and fix them, adding new people, resources and changing practices and structures. So, though this might sound like heresy to some people, marketing is well and truly a part of operations, distribution, manufacturing and recruitment for a start.

This same insight also enables marketers to understand the relevance of the product offer and define how to improve that too so (perhaps less radically) marketing involves a contribution to product design.

Even when you have the right product, life is such that there are probably a dozen alternative and equivalent products for consumers to choose from in their local store - Hey, I didn’t say this was easy! - and that’s where brands come in. Sure, you can begin to create an emotional differentiation in the cosmetics and packaging of your product - ask Philips Apple, Sony, Harley Davidson and pretty well all the auto manufacturers about this. However, that’s only a small step in the direction of branding and brand development and I’m not going to explain more - That’s what I get paid for!

In the “making sure you can deliver it …” department we get into internal marketing, which involves training and therefore brings HR into the equation. This is another of my favourite areas and one in which I think pretty well every business I see is under-performing. Delivery not only concerns the physical delivery of a product, but embraces the delivery of the emotional promise inherent in every brand. OK, you’ve heard me say this before, but its where most organisations slip up so I make no apologies for repeating myself.

Apart from not knowing what marketing is, the thing that prevents most organisations marketing effectively is their structure, practices and above all culture (I say “above all” because if the culture is right then the rest tends to get sorted). Most businesses are set up in silos representing different departments and that perpetuates a lack of cooperation between disciplines. Worse still, marketing is frequently viewed as one of the junior functions, sometimes even treated as separate to the mainstream business. Needless to say there isn’t much of a future for an organisation that doesn’t acknowledge the central role of marketing, but its essential for everyone on the team, whatever their specialisation, to be able to influence the work of other departments, which for most organisations means a new structure and set of practices. Thankfully I am increasingly encountering astute CEOs who create businesses with the cross-fertilisation and specialist accountability that is essential to business success in today’s competitive marketplace.

A structure like this works because it acknowledges that everyone around the table has capabilities or ideas beyond the boundaries of their defined role, but understands that specialists should call the shots in their own environment. For example, marketers tell the manufacturing/operations guys what they should make, the manufacturers decide how they are going to do this and identify what they need from everyone else in order to achieve that. This includes, for instance, the level of investment that the CEO needs to find. If to create the products, produce and deliver them requires a change in personnel the HR department either re-assign existing human resources or hire and train new people.

It works in reverse too. Having devised a strategy for delivering the necessary human resource, the HR people will hire the communications specialists to devise the communications that deliver the right people to the door and because communications is the essence of training the marketing people will be lending their expertise to this too. At each of these cross-over points there is opportunity for all parties’ input.

Part of the framework of HR strategy (as well as design, manufacturing and every other strategy in the organisation) will be the Brand Model that the Marketing Department has created with contributions from the board. No organisation is going to get very far from home without a Brand Model.

To bring us back to our second great misconception; a Brand Model is where marketing and sales rub shoulders because when the sales folks take to the stage in this business pantomime they will also have to be working within the framework of the Brand Model. The HR folks will have seen to it that they are the right people for the job and together with the marketing people will have created a training programme that will deliver them to their cue. Now its their turn to represent the brand and its promise - in fact, they could be the only flesh-and-blood manifestation of the brand the customer gets to see, so not only will they find it easier to sell if they work within the Brand Model and maintain consistency of message (see earlier [posts on consistency), but the organisation is depending on how faithfully they represent the brand promise for future sales.

Even though this is a very much simplified scenario the fact that marketing impacts on every area of every business should be pretty obvious. So, if you find yourself in one of my seminars or workshops and this question comes up, you’ll know not to tell me that marketing is the same as communications or sales.

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand · communications · consulting · efficiency · management · marketing · phil darby · recruitment · sales · strategy

Boris and the truth about brands

Thursday 8 May 2008 · No Comments

Last week witnessed a shift in the British political scene with the Tories gaining extra seats in local councils at the expense of Labour and the Tory candidate for London Mayor, (Bumbling) Boris Johnson scoring a resounding victory over the incumbent Labour (Communist actually!) (Red) Ken Livingstone. I’m not yet sure about Boris - it could be that London is buggered, but watching (blonde) Boris in action is sure as hell going to be more entertaining than the 2012 Olympics!

This Tory triumph represents two fingers for Labour and is a classic case of a) what happens when a brand (in this case Labour) fails to deliver its promise and b) how important the emotional side of brands is in any buying decision. David Cameron, the Conservative leader hasn’t come up with anything you could nail to your mast in the way of a policy yet, but the general opinion seems to be that he’s “our kind of guy”. Boris likewise won his contest really just by being a good bloke, in stark contrast to the slime-ball that Red Ken has always been. Welcome to the cut and thrust of political marketing!

The whole thing is a really great demonstration of how any kind of marketing works - the corporate and sub-brand relationship (Tory central office policies being represented at local level by brand Boris) and the harsh truth that a great brand is one that, when the Champagne bottles have been taken to the glass bank, delivers its promises. Yes, winning the election, just like making the first sale, only gets you as far as a seat at the crap table. Its what you do when you get there that really counts.

The terminology differs a bit between commercial and political marketing, but it all boils down to the same thing. You join the community by voting instead of buying and if you want to evangelise, you pay your fees and join your party, it all depends how close to the brand you feel. The parties are a sum of their membership and voters and the honeymoon period that they all talk about is the time immediately after election when the party has to put its plan into action. Up until that point the voting decision has been very much an emotional (right side of brain) thing now the rational left side of the electorate’s brain kicks in and takes increasing prominence (although it is never the whole story).

As with any organisation the people we see representing government are not those who will actually deliver the promises - that’s down to the minions - and the only way that the leaders can be certain that the delivery will match their promises is if they have their internal marketing really buttoned down. Every marketer in every sector faces the same issue. I was talking to someone the other day who said that they were going to vote BNP (British National Party - the remodelled National Front). His point was that their policies make sense. I felt obliged to point out that while I might agree, the real point was that while the senior party officials were spouting the (arguably) sensible stuff the grass roots representatives were interpreting this as race hate and ethnic cleansing. That’s what happens when your internal marketing fails and the front line do it their way! You could argue that its the same with Islam. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the Koran, but it leaves much to the interpretation of Imams, who, intentionally or otherwise sometimes use the vagueries of the text to justify their own ends.

I have had a little experience of working with political parties, so I appreciate that its more complex than a commercial brand, but that doesn’t mean that the same rules don’t apply. You have to have a programme and my Brand Discovery is as good as any, even in this context. The stages are clearly defined:

  • Establish exactly what your brand is all about - That’s the process of creating the Brand Model within which is the brand promise that every brand has.
  • Make sure that your stakeholders (party members and representatives) understand it, buy into it and commit to playing their part in its delivery.
  • Go and tell he world about it, confident in the knowledge that wherever they encounter your brand the experience will be consistent.

When you are doing this every contact you have with customers or electorate will further enhance your relationship give you greater opportunity for sales and make life far simpler and your business more efficient. I didn’t say it was easy, in fact its where most organisations (and I mean all but a very few indeed) fail, but that’s all the more reason to be focused and tenacious because when you have been missing the target by the margin that most businesses are you’ll see results very quickly.

Categories: Boris Johnson · Conservative · David Cameron · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Government · London Mayor · The Full Effect Company · Tory · brand · brands · communist · community · consistency · internal marketing · marketing · phil darby · strategy

What’s HR to do with marketing?

Thursday 17 April 2008 · No Comments

OK, I know I rattle on a lot about the various vested interests within organisations that prevent real cohesion or an integrated approach, but that’s because I keep bumping into ivory tower-builders and political dead-heads who undermine organisations’ success.

For instance, those of you who know me will know that I have always promoted the idea of HR as a marketing function.  After all, the definition of marketing is to leverage an organisation’s resources in order to deliver something that people want or need in the most efficient way and the biggest resource any organisation has are its people. So, as long as HR is about managing the employee resource it has to be a marketing function.

The problem is that HR people so rarely see it this way. There’s something so separatist about the way that HR is set up in most organisations that I come across, you would think that their role had nothing at all to do with the business.

I came across a national retail organisation the other day that was having great difficulty recruiting good store managers. This same organisation however, had recruited a manager in waiting and put her “on ice” as a deputy manager at one of its stores . This manager made an real impact and was very highly thought of so when the incumbent manager went on extended leave she stepped into the manager’s role and immediately produced better figures and team spirit.

The regular manager walked back into her job after six months or so and the stand-in was stepped down again. Odd enough in itself, but for some months the organisation continued to pay her a manager’s salary, so she lived with it. Then came the whammy, because the organisation’s HR people discovered some months down the line that they had been paying her as a manager when she had been acting as a deputy and demanded the incremental salary back from her. They were at pains to point out to me that they were legally entitled to do so, but, of course, that’s hardly the point.  It takes a very special level of stupidity for any organisation to do this route let alone one that was having problems finding good people.

The HR position was that “rules are rules” and the woman wasn’t entitled to a manager’s salary if she wasn’t doing a manager’s job. It quite escaped them that it was their fault that she wasn’t doing the job and as for the small matter of pissing-off a valuable employee, they didn’t see it as their problem. Their job was to enforce the rules, it was the job of operations to field that one! Frankly, I hope they go broke (and it seems they might), but even then I’m sure they won’t get it.

A couple of weeks back I was chatting with the global HR Director of one of our most respected marketing services groups who was explaining to me why the marcoms sector had a really primitive approach to HR (Tell me about it!) However, I’m not sure they are as alone in this as he seems to think. There are so many things wrong with the HR set-up in most organisations that its hard to know where to start, but there are two critical issues:

A) Although they are dealing with people most HR departments appear to be hide-bound by bureaucracy - and we all know where that leads.

B) So few HR people understand how crucial their role is to the delivery of the brand promise and certainly don’t visualise themselves as marketers.

Brands are communities and that means they are the sum of the attitudes, standards and opinions of their members. I work with organisations to drive business growth by developing their brands, not, by means of the papering-over-the-cracks-and-making-empty-promises approach that appears to be the default position adopted by most organisations, but by actually delivering a promise that people respond to. Delivery has a lot to do with having the right employees, so recruitment (under general HR) plays a critical role. My agency friend waxed lyrical about the deficiencies of recruitment consultants and their numbers-driven approach and plans to solve this one by removing outsourced recruitment entirely and replacing it with an in-house department that serves the organisation’s global needs. More power to his elbow I say!

Success is also about getting all of your people behind the brand and pushing in the same direction, which is what internal marketing is all about.  This is also very much a job for HR under the general management of their marketing colleagues yet I frequently have to argue with clients for the inclusion of HR people in the brand discovery workshops I run, which to me is a key indicator of old-fashioned, unenlightened, inefficient, or just plain shoddy management.

Of course, HR people are often the authors of their own destiny in this respect.  While it all seems pretty logical to me, I often feel myself slipping into Columbus’s shoes as he received the reaction to his suggestion that the world wasn’t flat! Then again, identifying the chicken and the egg in this cycle is something of a challenge.  Maybe  HR people have just been trained into this viewpoint by generations of sadly-lacking general management.

In the final analysis though, the argument is redundant, because as soon as you start identifying the things that drive success, you inevitably home in on the brand and when you dig into this you can’t help but realise how critical the HR function is to your brand development.  It all comes back to the need for an organised approach like my Brand Discovery programme, which I know isn’t the only programme in this area, but you’ll excuse me if I stick to the view that its the best - unless you know different that is?

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · HR · Human resources · The Full Effect Company · brand · brand development · brands · change · consistency · consulting · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · strategy